It ain’t pretty, but it works…

P.S. The last thing you want while gaming on a PC is to suck up CPU cycles to capture video. Obviously, this avoids that pitfall.

I read an article in this weekend’s newspaper talking about how Lindesy Jacobellis of the US’s snowboarding team crashed in the finals while commanding a race-winning lead for the gold. The article said that Lindesy’s crash was on the penultimate jump… a jump where she tried a trick called a “backside method”:2. She ended up with the silver.

So where to look to find the video on the web? Try NBC’s official “site”:1? Negative… like they’d actually have a useful search?

Hum, how about Google Video? Let’s say searching on “Jacobellis”:3? Yup, there’s a teaser 14 second video of the “finals”:4 which has a link to this “page”:5 on NBC’s site with video of the entire finals race (with an all-important video commercial at the beginning). They could have made it even better if the teaser video had a bit more action from the finals in it, instead of just the first 14 seconds of the race, but whatever.

However, it doesn’t look like you can embed the Google teaser video in a page. This seems kind of dumb, since the purpose of the teaser is to gain distribution.

Well, at least NBC appears to kind of get it and has “microchunked”:6 the content.

*_Updated 2006-02-21_*
Thinking about it, it’s kind of lame to even have a teaser video. Just let me embed the whole video on my site. Run an ad in front of the content if you like, force some links back to NBC’s site… whatever, just free-up the content or become internet roadkill.

[6(A VC on the future of content)]http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/12/tv_execs_need_t.html

[4(Google Video page for the teaser)]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8040680095261409350&q=jacobellis

[5(NBCs coverage of the finals)]http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/5115618/detail.html

[3(Google Video search for Jacobellis)]http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=jacobellis

[1(NBCs offical Olympic site homepage)]http://www.nbcolympics.com/

[2(Get some method air on Wikipedia)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardslide

This just in for California’s Bay Area weather forecast (aka, the “area forecast discussion”:1).

bq.. The next and more organized shortwave trough is then forecast to arrive on Saturday. Temperatures are even colder with this system so even lower snow levels are possible. Have mentioned light accumulating snows above 2000 feet on Friday and left no mention of accumulation for Saturday at this time. However there is a better chance of accumulating snows above 2000-3000 feet on Saturday.

p. So we could see some snow for the first time this season in the hills of the Bay Area as seen in this forecast image for Saturday.

Currently, there is a strong high-pressure system in the Gulf of Alaska that is sending the jetstream way up into Alaska/northern Canada and then wrapping it down around deep into California. Here’s a view of the action.

This weekend’s weather system will be fairly dry since it is cold and coming over land (not the usual over-sea route), so snow, if any, will be minimal.

[1(NOAAs area forecast discussion)]http://www.srh.noaa.gov/fwd/productviewnation.php?pil=MTRAFDMTR&version=0

I’ve been playing around a lot lately with Google Video… surfing through the “popular videos”:2… searching for “WRC rally videos”:3… and generally just wasting a bunch of time.

One of the great features that I’ve found on Google Video is the ability to host your videos. Once you have created a Google account, click on the “submit your video”:4 link at the bottom of the Google Video “homepage”:1. A preference page then loads followed by their “terms of service”:5 (which you might want to read, since you are agreeing to offer them a fairly broad license regarding your videos). After you agree to their terms of service a blank _video status_ page then loads. On this, you’ll find a link that says “_Click here to get started_”:6 which loads this page for downloading Google’s uploader client.

The uploader client is pretty basic allowing you to select videos for uploading.

Once the videos have finished uploading, go back to the Google Video homepage, click on the _submit your video_ link and resign-in to your account. This will load the video status page now listing the uploaded videos.

For each video you upload, you will need to click on the _Click here to proceed_ link in the status column. This brings up the video information page where you add descriptive meta data for the video (useful if you want people to find it via searching).

The video information page also has a _Advanced option_ link if you want to make your video pay-for-play. I haven’t used this option, so I don’t know how that whole mechanism works. Google then “verifies”:8 the video before it is available for searching and viewing.

But the best part of Google Video is that you can embed videos into your page. On the video’s page on Google Video you can find a _Put on site_ link on the right hand side. This opens a window displaying the HTML needed to embed the video using a Flash player. The code looks something like this (the display of the code breaks in IE and I am too lazy to fix this… but you should be using Firefox anyway).

Which renders to…

Zoinger says, video is here.

[8(How long does the video verification take)]http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26563&topic=1488

[7(Zoinger on the Costco Kirkland signature grill)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/07/17/costco-bbq-the-kirkland-signature%e2%84%a2-grill/

[6(Uploader page)]https://upload.video.google.com/UploadInfo

[5(Google Video terms of service)]https://upload.video.google.com/Terms

[4(Submit your video to Google Video)]https://upload.video.google.com/

[3(WRC rally videos on Google Video)]http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=WRC+rally&so=0

[2(Google Video popular video page)]http://video.google.com/videopopularpage

[1(Zoinger on MP4 in point-and-shoots)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2006/01/19/mpeg-4-video-codec-a-must-for-your-digital-camera/

So the EFF says “this”:1…

bq.. Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation

Consumers Should Not Use New Google Desktop

San Francisco - Google today announced a new “feature” of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new “Search Across Computers” feature will store copies of the user’s Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google’s own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user’s computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who’ve obtained a user’s Google password.

…blah, blah, blah.

p. Jeez… you have to opt-in to this feature otherwise the index is stored on your desktop.

Man, these folks are really baked or something, because they’re super paranoid. I’d “trust my info”:2 with Google thank you. Last time I “checked”:3, at 359 bucks, that trust is worth $106,030,000,000.

[3(Yahoo! Finance quote for GOOG)]http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog

[2(Google vs. the DOJ)]http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1138874712764

[1(EFF Says Just Say No)]http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004400